Turgenev

The home, the nest: are the lessons we learn there healthy? We leave and we retreat to it, sometimes wisely sometimes not. There’s a time in life when we’re confronted with the fact that we’re going to leave the nest, and we can choose either to really leave and create our new nest and trust our own nature, or not. This, at least for me, has been a difficult quandary. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, we can go on recreating the nest we’ve left, and enter into the same, sometimes, debilitating patterns. It is the latter of these that can tell us the best stories.

Admittedly, this could be a narcissistic statement from a man who has read too many books about self-defeating narcissistic males. I immediately think of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom from Updike’s Rabbit novels, or even though Saul Bellow had different protagonists each time, there’s not much separating Joseph from Dangling Man and the later, exemplary Moses Herzog, of which the novel gave its name (one suspects that there is not much to separate them from Bellow either). Although a slightly different texture here – early nineteenth century Russia – and where the omniscient narrator reigns supreme, The Nest of the Gentry suggests a place where the Rabbit might return: but are the lessons learnt there positive ones?

It is amiable Lavretsky who has returned home. Turning his back, according to the book’s jacket, on his European lifestyle and unfaithful wife, he is going back to the town he was born in, O-. The notes suggest that this is Orlyo, Turgenev’s own birthplace, and like Lavretsky, one wonders if Turgenev was returning to his own nest and indeed, why? Some expected home-spun wisdom and recuperation? A re-setting of the morals and reminder of what matters in life? The nest is a powerful metaphor for Turgenev clearly, who according to the introduction (my first reading of Turgenev, so we’ll have to trust it), frequently used imagery from the natural world. Familial, security, simple naturalness in nature certainly broods in the idea of the nest, but the first few pages suggest that this isn’t such a simple matter.

Whilst Lavretsky might have spent some time in the socialite (and infidel) Europa, the different ways that might have been learnt there, don’t seem to count for much in Turgenev’s novel, yet there’s not a plenitude of honesty in the naturalistic settings of the country either it seems. What is acute then is that sense of rigidity and almost a fear. With Lavretsky coming back, we’re poised with a person who is on the outside-looking in but at the same time, not.

Feelings for his cousin, Lizaveta, percolate. She already has two suitors in in the dandyish Panshin, and the brooding Lemm. This is a short novel though, and with a cast befitting of a Russian epic (no character list supplied in this edition from Alma: I think character lists should be compulsory in every Russian novel), there is a sense that the nest is purposefully crowded. You think of the chicks fighting for the mother’s rations on the return to the nest and slowly secreting is the idea that within the nest, as homely as it is, it can be quite a vicious place, as people battle for love and affection. The ones that are battling though, are the men for the affection and approval of the Mrs Bennett figure of Marya Dmitriyevna; the sage, yet wry, Marya Timofeyevna; and the aforementioned Lizaveta, Bathsheba Everdene-like with her triumvirate of suitors. But unlike Hardy’s novel also set in the country, and what perhaps makes Turgenev’s more accomplished than it, is that she will not get as much agency as Bathsheba.

Film poster from the 1969 adaptation of the film by Andrei Konchalovsky

As Lizaveta and Lavretsky’s feelings develop for one another, the stricture of which they’re in becomes apparent. It’s intense and muddled, reaching its epitome when Panshin proposes to Lizaveta, and attains subsequent approval of the elders in the nest. It’s around the same time Lavretsky has heard about the fate of his wife. Love isn’t possible, yet they feel it.

Turgenev constructs a masterful scene at this point. The six page chapter is almost entirely dialogue and it comes down to the steady accumulation of affects by Turgenev, the repression of the powers that lie beneath the two characters and their inability to confront it.

Laveretsky “does not know what he is feeling at the news” and would have felt more upset if’ he’d found out two weeks earlier. A tear holds in his eye as he speaks about it, a recurring image, that suggests what? Restraint? The need or necessity for them to withhold their emotions to the rest of their families and themselves?

“I learnt what a pure womanly soul means, and my past fell away from me even more”. At the news Lizaveta retreats, but Lavretsky follows her and feels he owed something as honest from her. Frankness, decides Lizaveta then, is the only way.
“Did you know I got a letter today?”
“From Panshin?”
“Yes, from him…how did you know?”
“He asked for your hand?”
“Yes,” said Liza, looking directly and seriously into Lavretsky’s eyes.
Lavretsky, in his turn, looked seriously at Liza.
“Well, and what reply did you give him?” he said finally.
“I don’t know how to reply,” returned Liza, unfolding and lowering her arms.
“What? You love him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like him. He seems to be a nice man.”
“You said the same thing in the same terms three days ago. I want to know whether you love him with that powerful, passionate feeling which we’re accustomed to call love?”
“As you understand it – no.”
“You’re not in love with him?”
“No. Is that really necessary?” [Author’s emphasis].

It’s going to be tough for Lavretsky, especially when Lizaveta’s mother approves of Panshin as well. This mattered back then, but we’d foolish to say that it didn’t matter now; it just works in different ways. Or is it just a case of Lavretsky’s European ways imdebting him with ridiculous conceptions of love? If that’s the case, he’s not quitting on those ways now: “Obey your heart: it will alone tell you the truth,” Lavretsky interposed. “Experience, reason – that’s all dust and ashes! Don’t deprive yourself of the best, the only happiness on earth.”

Hopeless romantic or an unashamed truth? Much too fancifully French for these rural Russians? But there is that pertinent feeling within that pervades the novel and is leaked out in that admonishment of experience and reason, as ‘dust and ashes’. Death and dust, something that we’re all fated for, whether we’re religious or not. One can see why somebody like Hemingway admired the novel so much; the way Turgenev keeps the surface bubbling, direct and honest, yet that thing that cannot be named (that even the most manly of Hemingway’s characters cannot confront) unavoidably influences that. It’s almost so restrained, yet so desperate, that they appear to be speaking to themselves through one another – “you said the same thing, in the same terms, three days ago.”

Lizaveta cannot comprehend the fact that Lavretsky has ‘loved’ before and indeed this is the question she appears to be battling with. There’s a reason that they want to keep Lizaveta at the nest and there’s a reason that she is sceptical of Lavretsky’s proclamations of love. Perhaps this is Turgenev’s scepticism and he has returned to the nest to write this story.

“Bitterness filled her soul: she had not deserved such humiliation. Love had not made itself felt as happiness: for the second time since the previous evening she wept. This new and unexpected feeling had only just been engendered in her heart, but already how heavy the price she had paid for it, how crude the touch of the alien hands on her cherished secret!…As long as she had lacked understanding of herself she had hesitated, but after that meeting, after that kiss, she could no longer hesitate: she knew she was in love, that she had fallen in love honourably and seriously, had committed herself firmly and for life, and was not afraid of threats – she felt that this union could be broken by force.”

This would seem a tone of valedictory from Lizaveta, but in the passage quoted prior to that, Lizaveta also embodies a feeling “akin to terror [that] had taken her breath away.” There’s not many moments of seclusion in the novel, but this is one of them, and it feels like something is falling through, giving away, in this acute moment of privacy.

Who knows what made Lavretsky and indeed, Turgenev, go back to the nest. But although the force may feel like a return to safety, it could in fact be the force that bred there in the first place. As Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is drying his wife’s hair for her, he notices “Nature is full of nests”. There’s a reason he’s called Rabbit.